Lucy Dodd
Introduction
Lucy Dodd (born 1981, New York) is an American artist known for immersive painting and performance-based installations. Her paintings incorporate a wide range of materials, including liquid smoke, flower essence, and dog urine, often installed theatrically in galleries and museums in a manner that suggests ritualized space. She lives and works in Kingston, New York.
Early life and education
Dodd studied at the Art Center College of Design, California (BFA, 2004) and Bard College, New York (MFA, 2011).
Career
Dodd's 2013 debut New York solo exhibition titled The Studio Before 54, organized by David Lewis at the project space No5A, established Dodd's practice as distinctly female, poetic and process-oriented while accomplishing a large-scale format evocative of, and holding their own from, the "traditional bravura" of artists such as Anselm Kiefer and Rudolf Stingel.
Her following 2014 exhibition at the David Lewis lower east side gallery space further established shamanistic qualities and organization of chaos within abstraction, critically comparative to mid-century artists like Cy Twombly, Sigmar Polke, and Robert Ryman alongside encampments with contemporaries like Jessica Jackson-Hutchins, Sarah Braman, and Uri Aran. This very same exhibition has also been described as bearing a "suggestion of craft, traditional women's work and a little black magic reinvigorating Modernist severity" while "frequently evok[ing] a less self-consciously aesthetic version of Lyrical Abstraction" while revealing in medium natural substances such as spirulina, kombucha, and yew berries paired with charcoal, pigments, and graphite in conditions where "they simply accumulated, while lying flat, and that different activities -- whether culinary, medicinal, or ritual -- were conducted on top of them."
Later in 2014 through 2015, Dodd was featured in a solo exhibition at the Rubell Family Collection in Miami, FL. Born 100 years after Pablo Picasso to the day, Dodd conceived a single monumental painting the exact size of Picasso's Guernica. A corresponding artist's book,The Genesis of a Painting, was released to accompany the exhibition.
Wuv Shop, Dodd's third solo New York exhibition at David Lewis in late 2015, has been noted as an "explor[ation] and disrupt[ion of] the ritualized nation of the space as she transform[ed] the exhibition and the works displayed during the show's two-month run.
Early 2016 marked the second institution exhibition for Dodd at The Power Station in Dallas, Texas. Titled Buttercut, the exhibition continued the pairing of domestic items and parties with paintings in "carefully haphazard installation[s]."
Almost fully concurrent with her Power Station exhibition in early 2016, Dodd exhibited in the Whitney Museum of American Art's Open Plan series featuring her trademark use of frottage and organic materials such as squid ink while "exploring both the fable of St George and the Dragon, and more personal mythologies attached to the history of the venue, and those who worked and rank there, Dodd's work promises to capture and reclaim some of the vibrant, cosmopolitan magic that the old boozer generated, before a changing Europe and escalating gentrification put such things at risk."